We’d wink and say, “Larsen’s getting a good long rest this time. But he’ll be back with something new up his sleeve, don’t you worry!”
We could joke about it, sure. When Larsen stole or cheated we could pretend we were playing a game with loaded dice—not really a deadly game, but a game full of sound and fury with a great rousing outburst of merriment at the end of it.
But there are deadlier games by far. I lay motionless, my arms locked across my chest, sweating from every pore. I stared at Harry. We’d been working all night digging a well, and in a few days water would be bubbling up sweet and cool and we wouldn’t have to go to the canal to fill our cooking utensils. Harry was blinking and stirring and I could tell just by looking at him that he was uneasy too. I looked beyond him at the circle of shacks.
Most of us were sleeping in the open, but there were a few youngsters in the shacks and women too worn out with drudgery to care much whether they slept in smothering darkness or under the clear cold light of the stars.
I got slowly to my knees, scooped up a handful of sand, and let it dribble slowly through my fingers. Harry looked straight at me and his eyes widened in alarm. It must have been the look on my face. He arose and crossed to where I was sitting, his mouth twitching slightly. There was nothing very reassuring about Harry. Life had not been kind to him and he had resigned himself to accepting the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without protest. He had one of those emaciated, almost skull-like faces which terrify children, and make women want to cry.
“You don’t look well, Tom,” he said. “You’ve been driving yourself too hard.”
I looked away quickly. I had to tell him, but anything terrifying could demoralize Harry and make him throw his arm before his face in blind panic. But I couldn’t keep it locked up inside me an instant longer.
“Sit down, Harry,” I whispered. “I want to talk to you. No sense in waking the others.”
“Oh,” he said.
He squatted beside me on the sand, his eyes searching my face. “What is it, Tom?”
“I heard a scream,” I said. “It was pretty awful. Somebody has been hurt—bad. It woke me up, and that takes some doing.”
Harry nodded. “You sleep like a log,” he said.
“I just lay still and listened,” I said, “with my eyes wide open. Something moved out from the well—a two-legged something. It didn’t make a sound. It was big, Harry, and it seemed to melt into the shadows. I don’t know what kept me from leaping up and going after it. It had something to do with the way I felt. All frozen up inside.”
Harry appeared to understand. He nodded, his eyes darting toward the well. “How long ago was that?”
“Ten—fifteen minutes.”
“You just waited for me to wake up?”
“That’s right,” I said. “There was something about the scream that made me want to put off finding out. Two’s company—and when you’re alone with something like that it’s best to talk it over before you act.”
I could see that Harry was pleased. Unnerved too, and horribly shaken. But he was pleased that I had turned to him as a friend I could trust. When you can’t depend on life for anything else it’s good to know you have a friend.
I brushed sand from my trousers and got up. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll take a look.”
It was an ordeal for him. His face twitched and his eyes wavered. He knew I hadn’t lied about the scream. If a single scream could unnerve me that much it had to be bad.
We walked to the well in complete silence. There were shadows everywhere, chill and forbidding. Almost like people they seemed, whispering together, huddling close in ominous gossipy silence, aware of what we would find.
It was a sixty-foot walk from the fire to the well. A walk in the sun—a walk in the bright hot sun of Mars, with utter horror perhaps at the end of it.
The horror was there. Harry made a little choking noise deep in his throat, and my heart started pounding like a bass drum.
II
The man on the sand had no top to his head. His skull had been crushed and flattened so hideously that he seemed like a wooden figure resting there—an anatomical dummy with its skull-case lifted off.
We looked around for the skull-case, hoping we’d find it, hoping we’d made a mistake and stumbled by accident into an open-air dissecting laboratory and were looking at ghastly props made of plastic and glittering metal instead of bone and muscle and flesh.
But the man on the sand had a name. We’d known him for weeks and talked to him. He wasn’t a medical dummy, but a corpse. His limbs were hideously convulsed, his eyes wide and staring. The sand beneath his head was clotted with dried blood. We looked for the weapon which had crushed his skull but couldn’t find it.
We looked for the weapon before we saw the footprints in the sand. Big they were—incredibly large and massive. A man with a size-twelve shoe might have left such prints if the leather had become a little soggy and spread out around the soles.
“The poor guy,” Harry whispered.
I knew how he felt. We had all liked Ned. A harmless little guy with a great love of solitude, a guy who hadn’t a malicious hair in his head. A happy little guy who liked to sing and dance in the light of a high-leaping fire. He had a banjo and was good at music making. Who could have hated Ned with a rage
